Dumond of Maine's Fish and Wildlife Depart
ment remain. From the only street, you can see
the border climb the mountainside and head
south-a 20-foot-wide swath of clear-cut,
maintained by the International Boundary
Commission, stretching from sea to sea.
Phil has seen enormous social change in his
32 years of experience.
"When I first came
up here, the Quebecois were a very 'moral'
people," he told me. "They wouldn't dance.
Men and women swam on opposite sides of the
lake. Now the standard of living in Quebec
Province is higher than ours, and they think
they're a little country. They think Americans
don't know how to dress, to eat, to enjoy them
selves. They have jokes about us.
"What surprises me is that the U. S. flag is
"I became a Canadianquickly. For others it
took years." The Reverend Lance Weisser,
ministering (above) at Quebec's Athelstan
Presbyterian Church,fled the U. S. during the
Vietnam War in 1968. He became one of some
20,000 antiwar Americans welcomed by
Canadians. American firearms get a different
reception: They are frequently seized at the
border. An Ottawa technician renders hand
guns inoperable prior to their destruction.
still flying here. Estcourt is lost. I'll be the last
one to leave, like the captain of the ship. Ha!"
Canada's more divisive border may be the
one between French and English speakers.
Since the fire of the French Separatist move
ment in the 1970s, when English-speaking
Canadians deserted by the thousands, Quebec
has merely smoldered. Now a new generation
of French-speaking entrepreneurs have inher
ited a province in their own image, but one
even more isolated than before. Paradoxically
Quebec supported the Free Trade Agreement
because it felt no pressure from American cul
ture. Ontario, the province most inundated by
American pop, was the most reluctant.
The isolation of Quebec is often painful.
When American Phil Norton married Brigitte
Bruneau of Montreal, they first tried living in
Pennsylvania, but Brigitte chafed under
American indifference to the news from Que
bec. They then moved to Montreal, where
Phil was uncomfortable with the French
Canadian taste for drawn-out bouts of smoke
filled conversation. So they compromised and
rented an old customs house near Franklin
Centre, Quebec, a mile from the border, sur
rounded by apple orchards and silence.
Brigitte speaks to Phil in French, he to her in
English. Two-year-old Gabrielle says things
like, "Papa, more de l'eau please." He edits a
small English-language newspaper in Quebec;
she commutes to work in Montreal.
Now even the compromise has foundered,
and Brigitte has her own apartment, closer to
her roots. "Although we each hold a fascina
tion for the other's culture, there are real dif
ferences that are difficult to bridge," Phil
wrote several months after I visited them.
THE UNITED STATES and Canada share
the longest undefended border in the
world. Each year more than a hundred
million people approach 96 legal bor
der crossings and thousands of informal ones.
Hybrid communities have evolved where the
border bisects farms and country roads, where
the line is more nuisance than necessity. Dairy
cattle sometimes wander back and forth, and
business deals are made without paperwork.
Guarding this frontier is the U. S. Border
Patrol with its electronic sensors and television
monitors that sometimes nab a pair of cold and
frightened Guatemalans struggling from the
Canadian woods into a U. S. snowbank.
The Rio Grande it isn't, pointed out the
NationalGeographic, February 1990
100